Media Representation Of The European Union: Comparing Newspaper Coverage In France, Spain, And The United Kingdom, Antonio V. Menéndez Alarcón

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Based on content analysis of newspapers and in-depth interviews of journalists, this article analyzes the role of the media in defining the European Union and, therefore, in contributing to the production and reproduction of social representations of the EU in the public. The research concentrated on three EU member countries: France, Spain, and the United Kingdom. The study is theoretically informed by news production theory. Results demonstrate that there are major differences among the newspapers analyzed here in terms of how they represented the EU in the news, according to their nationality and political orientation. Furthermore, many of the principles ...

Therapeutic Discourse And The American Public Philosophy: On American Liberalism's Troubled Relationship With Psychology, Clifford D. Vickrey

Honors Theses

I explore the main currents of postwar American liberalism. One, sociological, emerged in response to the danger of mass movements. Articulated primarily by political sociologists and psychologists and ascendant from the mid-fifties till the mid-seventies, it heralded the "end of ideology." It emphasized stability, elitism, positive science and pluralism; it recast normatively sound politics as logrolling and hard bargaining. I argue that these normative features, attractive when considered in isolation, taken together led to a vicious ad hominem style in accounting for views outside the postwar consensus. It used pseudo-scientific literature in labeling populists, Progressives, Taft conservatives, Goldwaterites, the New ...

The Emerging Civil Society In China And Its Impact On Democratization, Haolu Wang

Honors Theses

Recent years have seen an emerging civil society in an authoritarian China. The authoritarian embrace of civil society challenges the conventional wisdom that civil society is closely linked to democracy. In Beijing, the rhetoric of civil society linked less to democracy than to modernization. However, does civil society development have any impact on democratization in authoritarian regimes? The thesis tries to provide a tentative answer by studying civil society and democratization in post-Mao China. As a result of economic development and political reforms, gradual political liberalization has marked a shift of state-society relations that gives rise to a certain degree ...

Civil Society Sector And Political Change: An Interview With Catherine Lim, Lien Centre For Social Innovation

Social Space

Singapore is a society undergoing transitions. With a burgeoning migrant community, the advent of integrated resorts with casinos and an arguably increasingly effervescent non-profit, civil society sector, Singapore looks to be a society that is rapidly opening up. Yet, as writer and political commentator Catherine Lim controversially proposes, civil society and non-profit activists cannot create change without getting their voices heard and actively participating in the political process. She shares with Social Space, her thoughts on the indispensable ingredients for openness and political engagement in a society that wants to be truly global.

The Neoliberal University And Agricultural Biotechnology: Reports From The Field, Wilhelm Peekhaus

Wilhelm Peekhaus

Following in the footsteps of a variety of previous research that elaborates on the current state of affairs in academia, this article sets out the argument that neoliberalism and its corresponding iterations of science and technology and research funding policies in this country have implications for the types of knowledge that can be generated within and communicated without contemporary institutions of higher education. Using agricultural biotechnology as the lens through which to focus analysis, the article outlines a number of empirical examples that illustrate how the free flow of knowledge either critical of or not readily appropriated by capital is ...

Laboratory Experiments Collection

This commentary presents the case against housing rats and mice in laboratory cages; the commentary bases its case on their sentience, natural history, and the varied detriments of laboratory conditions. The commentary gives 5 arguments to support this position: (a) rats and mice have a high degree of sentience and can suffer, (b) laboratory environments cause suffering, (c) rats and mice in the wild have discrete behavioral needs, (d) rats and mice bred for many generations in the laboratory retain these needs, and (e) these needs are not met in laboratory cages.

Three Essays In Political Economy, David Pinto Quintero

Economics Graduate Theses & Dissertations

Chapter 1. The Effects of Political Competition on the Feasibility of Economic Reform

This chapter shows that democracies may fail to enact desirable economic reforms even when such reforms Pareto dominate the status quo and there are no informational asymmetries. The key insight is that, even when reforms entail economic gains for all agents, electoral political losses cannot be compensated politically. Consequently, when the majority party has strong electoral support, minority parties pursue both low-gain reforms and high-gain reforms. Intermediate-gain reforms are harder to enact, since the electoral costs dominate welfare gains. In highly contested environments, only high-gain reforms succeed ...

Robert Michels And The Iron Law Of Oligarchy, Pamela S. Tolbert

Articles and Chapters

[Excerpt] Resource mobilization, a dominant theoretical approach to the study of social movements for many decades, points to social movement organizations (SMOs) as a focal point for efforts to understand the variations in both the impact and fate of social movements. SMOs, like other types of political organizations, are expected to represent members’ common preferences for some specified social change, acting to bring about such change through influence on formal political decision-making, or on general behaviors of the members of a polity, or on both. In this context, the classic analysis offered by Robert Michels ([1911] 1962) of typical evolutionary ...

Moral Foundation Theory And The Law, Colin Prince

Seattle University Law Review

Moral foundation theory argues that there are five basic moral foundations: (1) harm/care, (2) fairness/reciprocity, (3) ingroup/loyalty, (4) authority/respect, and (5) purity/sanctity. These five foundations comprise the building blocks of morality, regardless of the culture. In other words, while every society constructs its own morality, it is the varying weights that each society allots to these five universal foundations that create the variety. Haidt likens moral foundation theory to an “audio equalizer,” with each culture adjusting the sliders differently. The researchers, however, were not content to simply categorize moral foundations—they have tied the foundations ...

Research Collection School Of Economics

This paper proposes a framework for understanding the joint evolution of cultural norms and human capital investment, and how these affect patterns of political participation. We first present some empirical evidence that cultural attitudes towards obedience systematically influence an individual's propensity to engage in different political activities: obedience discourages more confrontational modes of political activity (such as public demonstrations), while raising participation in non-confrontational civic acts (such as voting). These cultural attitudes further appear to be determined in part by cultural transmission across generations. Motivated by this evidence, we develop a dynamic model in which human capital and obedience ...

Paul K. Gellert

This article proposes the concept of an extractive regime to understand Indonesia's developmental trajectory from 1966 to 1998. The concept contributes to world-systems, globalization, and commodity-based approaches to understanding peripheral development. An extractive regime is defined by its reliance on extraction of multiple natural resources in the formation of an economic and political order that is also supported by global and regional forces. After elaborating the concept of an extractive regime, the article illustrates it through examination of Indonesia's developmental trajectory from its formation in the post–World War II era to its firm establishment during Suharto's ...

Paul K. Gellert

[Extract] John Bellamy Foster offers a dire picture of the ecological crisis facing us. He then uses a powerful set of tools to explain how capitalism’s logic of profit over people drives the crisis, and carefully explains, “why and how we should and can struggle for a more sustainable ecological and social order” (p.8). Building on the tradition of Raymond Williams, Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, and Rachel Carson, Foster intends his analysis of ecological crisis to lead not to despair but to a politics of hope aimed at concrete utopias. The book is a powerful contribution to public ...

Symposium: Perspectives On Fundamental Rights In South Asia, Anil Kalhan

Anil Kalhan

This symposium issue of the Drexel Law Review marks the anticipated launch of a proposed new section on Law and South Asian Studies of the Association of American Law Schools, including several contributions that were initially presented during a session of the proposed section at AALS Annual Meeting for 2010. The proposed AALS section comes at a moment of heightened interest in the region among lawyers, policymakers, and the public at large in the United States, and is part of a rapidly growing constellation of scholarly initiatives on law in South Asia that have emerged internationally in recent years. In ...

Paul K. Gellert

Scholars interested in the promotion of ‘‘good governance’’ and those interested in transnational advocacy networks both are concerned with the potential power of external actors to alter domestic political structures. This article analyses the networks promoting neo- liberalisation and democratic practices in Indonesia’s forestry sector as rival transnational net- works. The analysis finds that the Asian economic crisis and collapse of the Suharto regime provided a political opening for alliances between the two rival networks that helped to bring down the ruling oligarchy in timber, but the power of domestic oligarchs controlling the sector remains strong. In brief, there ...

The Childhood Of Human Rights: The Kodak On The Congo, Sharon Sliwinski

Sharon Sliwinski

This chapter examines the Congo reform movement’s use of atrocity photographs in their human rights campaign (c. 1904–13) against Belgian King Leopold, colonial ruler of the Congo Free State. This material analysis shows that human rights are conceived by spectators who, with the aid of the photographic apparatus, are compelled to judge that crimes against humanity are occurring to others. The article also tracks how this judgement has been haunted by the potent wish to undo the suffering witnessed.

Paul K. Gellert

[Extract] Conventional geopolitical perspectives on oil posit that the world's total oil supplies have been depleted to such an extent that we are past the peak, and confiict and rising prices are to be expected. Political economy perspectives often reject such neo- Malthusian ideas and stress the importance of oil as a strategic commodity for the perpetuation of hegemonic power, in this case by the United States. Mazen Labban's insightful, dense, and short book (roughly 150 pages) applies a Marxian geographic analysis to the subject of oil with a focus on the Soviet Union, Russia, and Iran. In ...

Touring The Troubles In West Belfast: Building Peace Or Reproducing Conflict?, Wendy A. Wiedenhoft Murphy

Wendy A. Wiedenhoft Murphy

This article examines the development of tourism in West Belfast, Northern Ireland, and explores the extent to which tourism builds peace or reproduces processes of past conflict. Data were collected through semistructured interviews with tour managers and tour guides that include West Belfast in their itineraries and participant observations of tours conducted in West Belfast in the summer of 2007. The findings from this data suggest that while tourism there is reproducing some processes of past conflict, particularly territoriality, it has the potential to build cross-community relationships.

A Professionalized Society: Our Real Future, Melvyn L. Fein

Melvyn L. Fein

Liberals and conservatives are both wrong. We are not moving toward the communal utopia liberals favor. Nor are we headed toward the theocratic utopia many conservatives prefer. To the contrary, thanks to the fact that we have become the first primarily middle class society in the history of the world, we are lurching toward a professionalized society. More of us than ever must acquire a self-motivated expertise in what we do. Whether on the job, in politics, within our marriages, or when raising our children, we must know what we are doing and be personally committed to doing it well ...